JSON

You may have heard of JSON before. No, I'm not talking about my name, I'm talking about the serialization format. JSON stands for JavaScript Object Notation and is a way of serializing data so you can access it later. Why are we talking about this in Ruby when it's JavaScript? I'm glad you asked! JSON is a plain text serialization format which means you don't really need any special software to read and write it -- you only need to be prepared for the different formats of objects inside it. JSON may have started with JavaScript but is in wide use now and it's pretty much standard that every programming language can read and write JSON.